Carol of the Bells
by spare
Summary: And so when Watanuki finds himself, on Christmas Eve, trudging along a snowy path under the milky light of a nearly bloated moon, with Doumeki Shizuka, of all people, he could only grumble beneath his breath and blame it on stupid, repetitive hitsuzen.


**Title:** Carol of the Bells  
**Author: **Spare  
**Word Count: **3,016**  
Rating:** G  
**Summary:** And so when Watanuki Kimihiro finds himself, on Christmas Eve, trudging along a snowy path under the milky light of a nearly bloated moon, with Doumeki Shizuka, of all people, he could only grumble beneath his breath and blame it on stupid, repetitive hitsuzen.  
**Notes:** Wrought in response to **iambickilometer**'s _Carol of the Bells_ challenge at the lj community. Because the music won't get out of my head and I badly need sleep. And because, right on the day I get wind of the challenge, I see a news feed stating my beloved alma mater's landmark carillon-tower-thingy got repaired, finally. So there you have it: hitsuzen. (And here I thought I wasn't going to write anymore xxxHolic fanfics. Oh, well. Let's call this my last, then.)  
**Warnings:** Author operated on 'gut feel' and major sugar-overload while typing this. Traces of fluff. Could be seen as Doumeki x Watanuki, but then, one could make oneself believe it isn't, in much the same way Watanuki keeps himself in (Deliberate? Clueless?) denial. Minor reference to Cooking Master Boy.  
**Disclaimer:** xxxHolic and corresponding characters belong to CLAMP.

**Carol of the Bells **

By Spare 

ô

On the 23rd of December—a Sunday, with the surrounding rooftops and trees and the ground frosty-white with a night's dusting of snow, yet another customer found her way to Yuuko's shop.

Tall and willowy, she looked to be in her mid-twenties; twenty-eight, at most. Her skin, what little there was to see beyond the claret fur-lined trench coat she wore, was pale, almost luminous, and her hair, cropped short but with a few soft curls sparsely framing her slender neck, was a muted, silvery gray.

Watanuki Kimihiro, left out in the courtyard to shovel snow out of the walkway and to consider the evening's repast (hotpot would be good, but they'd had hotpot just the other day already), could not rightly tell what the color of her eyes were, for they were closed, unseeing. They would remain closed for the rest of Yuuko's obligatory interview, and afterward, once the guest had left, Yuuko would sate just the tiniest bit of Watanuki's curiosity and declare that yes, the shop's latest customer was blind, and no, the return of her sight wasn't what she had sought after.

And that would cost him three large plates of potstickers, assorted shuumai, and an extra six-pack of Kirin beer. On top of that 'Singed Cuisine' dish she'd asked him to try preparing (Watanuki now knows better than to agree to watch, without any question of underlying intent, the entire videotaped run of _Cooking Master Boy_ Yuuko had made him retrieve from the basement).

The customer may or may not be human. Watanuki, of course, could ask the Space-Time Witch about it, but considering he _really_ does not want to give his employer of two-odd years any more reason to deduct more from his non-existent paycheck (or for Doumeki to shoulder part of it), he thinks it wise to shut up for the meantime and scurries, dutifully, to the kitchen. At any rate, it's not like he needs to know.

What he does know, is this: that customer has a wish, and the shop is there to grant it.

And if granting it entailed having Watanuki go someplace—unnatural or not—with someone—unwelcome or not—who'd 'go with him', what of it? It's not like he could ever decline, anyway.

And so when he finds himself, the following night, trudging along a snowy path under the milky light of a nearly bloated moon, with

—_who else, but—_

Doumeki Shizuka, of all people, he could only grumble beneath his breath and blame it on stupid, repetitive hitsuzen.

"It's too cold," Watanuki grouses, "and it isn't even snowing." He wore a blue pashmina and a pair of mufflers over his black Holy Cross wintercoat, yet still the frosty air bit into his skin and made his teeth chatter. "Just what _is_ this place, anyway? If I knew it was going to be this cold out here, I would have—w-what the hell!"

"Shut up," Doumeki says, evenly, and moves to drape his own wintercoat more comfortably around Watanuki's shoulders.

"I don't need your coat!" Watanuki protests. And he doesn't, he really, really doesn't, and Doumeki was a presumptuous bastard to go and take it off like that and think Watanuki would gladly wear it. And besides, Watanuki thinks, sneaking a sidewise glance at his stoic schoolmate, wasn't he—?

"I'm not that cold," Doumeki assures him, shrugging diffident arms whose hands sported, predictably enough, the moss-green gloves he had knitted for him, and walks on ahead. "Don't worry."

Watanuki bristles at the archer's back. "_Who_ would worry about _you_!" The way he yells it, his voice ought to carry clear through the skeletal husks of trees that lined their path, and so it does.

Doumeki just plugs his ears.

ô

They reach the end of the path a quarter or so before midnight.

A belltower stood there, just as Yuuko had said there would be, and Watanuki could not help but look up at the structure, amazed. It was obviously old, its brick walls largely overrun with moss and crumbling in places. One could wonder what the color of those walls was during the day, but in the pallid moonlight the tower could only be described as gray, and tall. So tall that it dwarfed the surrounding trees, and the two puny high school students who were instructed to climb it.

"This is the place, I guess," Watanuki declares needlessly, staring up the length of the building. Viewed from where he stood, the tower seemed to stretch all the way up to the sky. More than a hundred feet tall, at least.

"Aa." Doumeki himself had stopped just outside the door, trying to open it.

It wouldn't budge, and when the archer pronounces as such, Watanuki sighs, and says, "Let me try, then." Because it was nearing midnight, and the bespectacled boy distinctly remembers Yuuko expressly stating they had to reach the top of the belltower by the time the clock struck twelve. Otherwise—

The brass knob turns easily enough, the heavy mahogany door appearing not to swing so much as _spring_ open, and the two boys soon find themselves in a darkened room heavy with the stale smell of dust. A room that was as cold as, if not colder than, the path they had trodden outside. A room with nothing much else inside it but what looked like decomposing leaves and soda cans littered about the floor, and a staircase that would go on up—in loops and swirls of wooden planks and iron rails—to forever.

Or at least, as Watanuki would attest, counting close to three hundred steps and then, after looking up and seeing that the stairs continued on (not even half-way through), stopping—it certainly seemed that way.

The higher they went, too, the more the air seemed to grow even colder. Watanuki half-expected frost to materialize on his glasses, the wisps of dark hair that feathered his mismatched eyes, but none did.

Frost was the least of his concerns, at any rate. The more they inched their way to the top, the more the bespectacled boy found it harder to proceed. His feet felt heavier with every step, his limbs growing frustratingly slow and sluggish.

Doumeki, apparently quite truthful in having asserted that the cold did not affect him (or rather, that he did not feel the cold at all—this cold that to Watanuki seemed almost a living thing), notices this, and halts.

"Oi. You alright?" the taller boy asks, in a tone of voice that absolutely did not carry any hint of concern whatsoever—Watanuki would like to think so, anyway—over his shoulder.

Watanuki makes a nigh-herculean effort to shorten the steadily lengthening margin by which he'd been trailing behind Doumeki and replies, "I'm fine." Except he isn't, not quite, but he'd be damned before he'd go and admit it outright.

Doumeki sees through this, evidently, and back-tracks down the stairs to where Watanuki was. "Do you feel sick?" the archer inquires, green-gloved hands settling on his sides, helping him up.

_Oh._

Only then does Watanuki realize he'd all but collapsed, clinging like a drunken man to the banister for support. He feels Doumeki's fingers slide perhaps a second or two longer just above his waist, then up the arch of his back, before his left arm is looped across the taller boy's shoulders. He shivers.

"No," Watanuki declares. And of course he was not at all embarrassed nor untowardly aware of the Doumeki's proximity. Most definitely not. "Just cold. And heavy." Maybe just a little bit grateful, but nothing else. At the archer's infinitesimally dubious look, he glares. "Quit staring! It's almost midnight, and we've wasted enough time dawdling as it is!"

The low, not-quite murmur from the other boy in response might have been "Idiot," might have been—something else, but Watanuki concentrates on not-stepping on Doumeki's toes and not-making either of them trip and crash down the infinite spiral of stairs as a result, so he doesn't quite hear it.

What he does hear—so soft and subdued that for a moment Watanuki wondered whether he merely imagined it—is the single, solitary tolling of a metal bell. It came from somewhere above them, and in fact upon the second peal—thirty or so steps up the stairs and the end of it finally in sight—much clearer than the first, he was sure it came directly above them. On the third ring, it came from _everywhere_—and he and Doumeki more or less stumbled off the stairs and onto the dusty floor of the top-most room of the belltower, out of breath.

ô

Considering the various other oddities Watanuki has witnessed in his years of employment under the touted Dimensional Witch, the sight of what looked to be an upright piano with sets upon sets of wooden levers as keys and several pedals at its feet, playing by itself, should not be so—startling. Except it was. Because there was no one pounding on the keys, and yet they moved, and no one was stepping on the metal pedals, and yet they pushed down, moving as swiftly, as precisely, as a virtuoso would command, making the bells somehow attached—wired—to the contraption ring in perfect harmony. To a melody that Watanuki recognized as a popular Christmas carol (was it England? Ireland?) from Europe. Up here, right where more than forty (forty-six?) bells loomed and clanged above their heads, that melody was the world.

_A music box, maybe? Something inside it that makes it play automatically?_

But somehow Watanuki had a feeling that it wasn't that, that what he was seeing—and hearing—was what it was. And what it was, was

—_magic—_

a strange-looking keyboard playing Christmas carols by itself, at midnight. Besides, while he supposed it may be possible for some device to make the levers move, Watanuki was pretty sure no amount of mechanical know-how could make the air around it _shift_ just so with each beat. Or slowly transform the room and their surroundings.

And that, the keyboard did. As the bells chimed the chorus the dusty floor shone sparkling clean, the grimy walls looked freshly-painted, the clavier itself, once scratched and dilapidated, with not a few levers loose, gleaming as if it was polished and oiled that very night. The music played on, a near-deafening crescendo towards the finale, and a light shone through the room; a soft, drowsy light, the coppery light of dusk,

—_which was strange, because it was midnight, wasn't it?—_

and suddenly it _was_ dusk, and the air, while cool, was nowhere near the freezing tundra of before.

A girl of perhaps ten, perhaps eleven years of age stood by the keyboard, regarding him bemusedly. Her eyes were the clearest shade of green Watanuki has ever seen, the irises accented with glints of gold. It was the color of warmth. Of summer.

"So, you've found me," she declares, smiling winsomely. "In spite of the bitter cold, you found me." And she looks so happy to say so that Watanuki does not quite know what to say in reply.

He looks around. Doumeki was nowhere in sight.

_Was he left behind, then? From when I crossed the world of the dilapidated belltower to—to wherever this is?_

Regardless, he was still on an errand for Yuuko-san, and hadn't Yuuko told him he was here to retrieve something?

"A pocket watch," Watanuki says, half to himself, and half to the girl before him. Ah, yes, that was it. "I went up here to retrieve a pocket watch for—a friend."

The girl nods. "Come, then," she replies, and walks fleetly ahead, long silvery-gray curls bouncing merrily against the rumpled folds of her white knee-length cashmere coat, the sole of her boots thumping against the floor. "Follow me out."

With more than a few misgivings, Watanuki follows her down, dreading another odyssey with the belltower's staircase, and is pleasantly surprised when their trip to the ground floor progresses without incident. The bottom of the stairs seemed to have transformed as well; gone were the dead leaves and the various refuse that were more or less molded to the floor. Not a trace of dust on the walls or the banister. And the door—the door that looked so much like the one he and Doumeki had gone through earlier that night, except this door was newly carved and hardly scratched and opened with nary a creak from its hinges—inscribed on it was a tiny symbol. It looked to Watanuki like a stylized jasmine in full bloom.

"You came just in time," the girl was now saying. "You see, this world is just about ready to disappear forever."

Watanuki looks at her. "And you, with it?"

She nods. "Couldn't be helped," she states simply.

They go outside, and Watanuki is greeted by the sight of bare trees and clear skies and twilight bathing the world in molten gold and shadows. The path, yet untouched with snow, stretched on and on before them. As he watches, the girl goes to one of the nearby trees, procuring a cloth bag she must have hung about one of its branches. She has the pocket watch in her hands when she returns.

"Good thing I could pass this on to someone else before that happens," she says, and places the watch in Watanuki's gloved hands.

He accepts it, and barely has time to blink or even begin to inquire after the girl's name, when he is shaken—and rather violently, too—by his shoulders, by someone persistently tugging on his coat. Or rather, on the wintercoat Doumeki had loaned him, the one he wore over his own. In lieu of the cold, of course.

Figures that the one on the other end of it—the hands doing the shaking, that is—was none other than

—_stubbornly, lovingly persistent—_

Doumeki himself. His stoic schoolmate (Rival? Friend?) watches him blink a few times in the darkness of the room—back at the belltower, back at the dusty old belltower with the crumbling walls and the keyboard that played Christmas carols at midnight—and Watanuki isn't sure, but decides that the expression in Doumeki's amber eyes can't be relief.

He feels oddly touched, anyway.

That is, until the stone-faced jerk reminds him just _why_ he was such a jerk in the first place.

"So you're awake," Doumeki intones, and sighs once. Gruffly. Enough to push quite a few of the bespectacled boy's buttons. "Finally. Get off already."

And it is at this point that Watanuki realizes he has somewhat, sometime between the end of his

—_dream, within yet another dream—_

trance and the point when Doumeki had shaken him awake, if only to stop him from sleepwalking straight towards the top of the staircase, they'd somehow ended up on the musty floor, with the archer beneath him and Watanuki straddling his thighs, arms half-nestled on his chest.

The reddening of his face, and Watanuki's ensuing verbal barrage of curses and loud denials and exclamations of "Why the hell did you take so long to wake me up, anyway?!" was all due to wrath. Yes, wrath.

They both get up (and not a second sooner!). Watanuki, looking everywhere but Doumeki and glancing at the silver pocket watch Yuuko had asked them to retrieve from a belltower ("_Albeit a different one from where you're going,"_ Yuuko had said cryptically before he'd set out, and which he now understood), notes the time: _01:04 am_. He'd been out for an hour or so.

He takes off Doumeki's wintercoat, folds it compulsively in a neat little bundle, then holds it out to the taller boy. "I'm not that cold anymore," Watanuki states, defiantly, challengingly, and waits. But Doumeki appears to accept this, _this_ time, and takes his coat and puts it back on, no questions asked.

Here the air still belonged to winter. But, Watanuki would note, as they made their way down the long flight of stairs and out to the snow-laden path beyond, not quite as cold as before.

ô

"Borrowed time," Yuuko states, simply, and swirls the contents of her wine-glass—for the occasion, brandy, to complement the giant Christmas cake Watanuki had baked around teatime—about, as tendrils of white smoke drifted about her. In a luxuriant gown of patterned red silk accented by gold threads and an abundance of lace, her attire looked entirely festive, yet as artfully alluring as ever. "That's what you retrieved, Watanuki."

Maru and Moro ran about the spacious room, joyfully intoning "Borrowed time! Borrowed time!", as Mugetsu slinked on after them.

Their customer had returned, not long before—the customer with the silvery-gray hair and whose eyes Watanuki now knew to have been a beautiful emerald shade—although this customer insisted that it was her first time stepping inside the shop. Today: December 25th. It was almost as if she had never visited last Sunday, and considering what had transpired at midnight, at the belltower that magically evoked a mirror of another place—no, another _time_—well, the implications of it had made Watanuki's head hurt and he decided that, consequences be damned, he needed to get some answers. And so as soon as the customer had taken the watch and left—for good, presumably, her wish having been granted, he throws caution to the wind and asks the Space-Time Witch herself.

Yuuko's too-happy smirk and the glint in her crimson eyes chilled his blood, but he did confirm a thing or two. And it wasn't like the witch would have anything truly diabolical in store for him as his payment for knowing.

Of course, when he learns later of his employer's plans for the evening (one which involved 1. a maid outfit, 2. a very large box with a very large silk ribbon, 3. rope, 4. masking tape, 5. Mokona's newly acquired Tengu fan, and 6. a note which read "_To Doumeki—Hope you enjoy your Christmas Gift! Best Wishes—Santa Yuuko"_), Watanuki would think, on hindsight, that _that_ hardly was the case.

The End

**Terms & References:**

Carillon – n. also glockenspiel (Germany); the heaviest musical instrument, composed of at least 23 metal bells, played via fists and feet through a clavier or keyboard. The entire contraption is traditionally installed in a tower. This is the 'strange-looking keyboard' that Watanuki saw.

Cooking Master Boy – an anime shown during the '90s about—you guessed it—a 'cooking master' boy's adventures in Imperial China. Go wiki it or something. Showcased in the 50-odd-episode run are signature dishes from Szechuan, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing. I mentioned this anime mainly because of the food, prepared through skills bordering on superhuman (and at times defying the laws of physics and common sense) and the out-of-this-world reactions of the people who'd taste such dishes. And because I wince at the poorly-dubbed rerun being shown on local tv (why do the good dubbers only do the Korean and J-dramas?).

Hitsuzen – literally 'necessary', or 'what should be'; fated, pre-ordained.


End file.
